Auditory Streams in Ligeti's Continuum: A theoretical and perceptual study

Background in music theory/analysis The primary goal of musical analysis is eliciting the organization of a musical structure in terms of its constituent parts and the relations/functions between them at various levels of description. Musical analysis focuses primarily on aspects of compositional design (what the composer had in mind when composing a certain piece), mathematical/formal relations between musical materials (e.g. pc-set theory etc.) or on musical theoretic forms and functions that have been established as musicologically pertinent through the centuries (e.g., traditional harmonic analysis, Schenkerian analysis). Listeners’ perception is not usually the explicit goal of analytical methodologies. Background in music psychology The coherence of a progression of tones or sonorities depends on a number of perceptual factors that have been described in the domain of auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990). Principles of musical stream perception may be used to understand of the way a listener ‘makes sense’ of a musical work. The way a musical work is perceived by a listener may be significantly different from the organization of notes suggested by a score, or even from analytic results given by different musical analytic methodologies. Aims The aim of this paper is to show how a number of auditory streaming principles may be used to obtain a better understanding of a specific musical work, namely Ligeti’s Continuum for harpsichord. We show that ‘traditional’ music analytic methodologies are insufficient to account for the listening challenges posed by the specific work, and that music perception can shed new light in our understanding of the musical structure of this piece. Main contribution Ligeti’s Continuum is a representative example of his meccanico style, in which extremely fast isochronous pitch successions unfold gradually creating a smoothly evolving musical continuum. A number of papers describe aspects of the formal design of the piece and, also, refer to Ligeti’s own comments regarding the meccanico style (e.g. Hicks 1993), but no study addresses directly the challenging issue of how the piece is actually perceived. In the current study, auditory streaming processes based on principles such as the principles of Temporal Continuity, Tonal Fusion, Pitch Proximity, Pitch Co-modulation, and Onset Synchrony Principle (Huron, 2001) and, also, aspects of sound ’grain’ perception (Roads, 2001) are used as an analytic tool to explain various musical phenomena appearing in the piece. Ligeti’s work is analyzed both in terms of melodic/voice and harmonic evolution. It is shown that musical psychology can offer a very fruitful way of looking directly into certain structural features of music that other analytic methodologies have difficulty dealing with. Implications 'Underlying all aspects of analysis as an activity is the fundamental point of contact between mind and musical sound, namely musical perception.' (Bent, 1980:341) However, the 'fundamental point of contact between mind and musical sound’ is not usually explicitly the goal of analysis. The current study shows how musical perception can play a direct role in musical analysis and how it can provide new insights in our understanding of musical structure. Moreover, it suggests that composers may benefit from research in musical perception by having knowledge of how their music is likely to be perceived by audiences. The integration of perceptual and musicological perspectives in contemporary musical analytic methodology enriches not only our understanding of musical structure, but also provides a broader and more ’scientific’ framework for musical analysis that can lead to various practical applications (pedagogical, compositional, computational, and so on).